Don't smoke in France, or tobacco will mouthrape you.

"To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco."

PARIS — "A new French antismoking advertisement aimed at the young that plays off a pornographic stereotype has gotten more attention than even its creators intended, and critics suggest that it offends common decency and creates a false analogy between oral sex and smoking."

Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/24/world/europe/24france.html

the "Twin Peaks" shooter

Version 2.0:
Float ¼oz of 151 on top, ignite.
"Fire, Walk with ME."

"BRAIN IMAGING SHOWS PLAYING TETRIS LEADS TO BOTH BRAIN EFFICIENCY AND THICKER CORTEX"

I knew it.

"Researchers at the Mind Research Network today announced the findings of a scientific study that used brain imaging and Tetris to investigate whether practice makes the brain efficient because it increases gray matter.

"Over a three-month period, adolescent girls practiced Tetris, a computer game requiring a combination of cognitive skills. The girls who practiced showed greater brain efficiency, consistent with earlier studies. Compared to controls, the girls that practiced also had a thicker cortex, but not in the same brain areas where efficiency occurred.



"Relative to controls, red areas show where practice led to a thicker cortex; blue areas show more efficient brain function after practice; right image is right hemisphere; left image is the left hemisphere."

Original article here: http://www.mrn.org/latest/brain-imaging-shows-playing-tetris-leads-to-both-brain-efficiency-and-thicker-cortex

GBTI - Wax Cylinders Edition.

http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php

"Cylinder recordings, the first commercially produced sound recordings, are a snapshot of musical and popular culture in the decades around the turn of the 20th century. They have long held the fascination of collectors and have presented challenges for playback and preservation by archives and collectors alike.

"On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound."


This "Cylinder Preservation" website is the sort of internet-only use of technology that I absolutely adore (see my April 23rd post about old van Gogh).

Want to hear a Sarah Bernhardt recitation? Want to hear the first recording of Thomas Edison? Want to hear Enrico Caruso's actual singing voice? All this & more just a few clicks away, for free, to explore as deeply as you want.

I also groove on the idea that those wax-cylinder recordings represented 'cutting edge' technology when new, about a hundred years ago; a century from now what technology will people use to learn about a little thing we called 'the internet'?

HONDA developing Power-Assisted Atomic-Wedgie

"Honda unveils experimental walking assist device with bodyweight support system"
http://world.honda.com/news/2008/c081107Walking-Assist-Device/

And be sure to check the video here:
http://world.honda.com/news/2008/c081107Walking-Assist-Device/video/

The mathematics of surviving the inevitable zombie outbreak.

Fantastic:
http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf

(Good thing zombies suck at mathematics and statistics.)

An elegant solution, but....

"The prints we make for our 'daily use' not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges (or toner) could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.

"Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink. Free to download, free to use.

"The picture illustrates how the Ecofont was created by omitting parts of the letter. At the shown size, this obviously is not very nice, but at a regular font size it is actually very usable. Naturally, the results vary depending on your software and the quality of your screen. The Ecofont works best in OpenOffice, AppleWorks and MS Office 2007. Printing with a laser printer will give the best printing results.

"The Ecofont is based on the Vera Sans, an Open Source letter, and is available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux."

I like the idea behind a font specifically designed to save on ink, but I get the same results (that is, trading legibility for toner-conservation) when printing text by setting the printer to 'Black & White' and 'Fast (as opposed to Quality)'.

Seattle is UTTERLY HUMORLESS about its trees...

...and because of it I couldn't be prouder to call Seattle home.

This stone "memorial" is on the Burke-Gilman Trail near my apartment. The only other stones on the trail like this are on Memorial Benches erected by families for their loved ones.

The text reads, after the 'Seattle Parks And Recreation' logo:

"In memory of seven trees: three silver poplars and four Douglas firs, approximately 70 feet in height, that were fatally damaged by illegal herbicide application in August 2008.

Whenever a tree is intentionally killed, the whole community feels its loss."

I mean come on, has your town ever erected a plaque commemorating murdered trees?!

Billy Mays did coke? Get outta here!

Autopsy uncovers cocaine in Billy Mays' body
Examiner: Drug use caused or contributed to heart disease, death

The price of Freedom?

Worldwide Military Spending,
from the CIA World Factbook, Center for Arms Control and Non-proliferation.

( Click on the map for full size).

America spends almost half of all of the world's military spending. The next closest level is all of Europe combined at less than half of what we spend.

Where does all that money go? Quite frankly I think I'd feel 'safer' if that money were going instead to end this Great Recession.